Ideas worth spreading

Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

1,931,360 views | Marcin Jakubowski • TED2011

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

Marcin Jakubowski

Marcin Jakubowski

Farmer and technologist

See speaker profile

Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing a set of blueprints for 50 farming tools that can be built cheaply from scratch. Call it a "civilization starter kit."

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.